Britain’s most senior judge, Baroness Hale of Richmond, has criticised the
British legal profession for failing to hire talented women in senior
positions, blaming a culture of “unconscious sexism”.

Addressing the London School of Economics, the only female Supreme Court justice said in a public lecture that talented women were not given senior roles in the law because often interviewers were most comfortable hiring men. She said that certain legal recruiters also let long-held prejudices get in the way of gifted female candidates progressing.

“I suspect they’re not very good at assessing people who have come from different backgrounds,” she said. “We think we have got equal opportunities, but I would guess, for all sorts of reasons, they’re not necessarily truly equal because so much assessment of merit is subjective.

“There’s an awful lot of unconscious assumptions and judgements that are made when people don’t realise that that’s what they’re doing. The more used they are to having women, and people from ethnic minorities, around, the less that’s a problem because they know how we behave. But if you hardly ever see a woman, you don’t really know how to assess somebody who’s a candidate.”

Baroness Hale called for greater flexibility in a system which still only selects senior posts from a small pool of seasoned well-known lawyers and said that greater diversity would improve the "democratic legitimacy" of the law.

“It is tiring to have to be talking about why we have so few women in the higher ranks of the judiciary in this country when most countries in the world have solved the problem. It is a bore,” she said.

“I would like us not to have to talk about it, but we do have to talk about it because the present situation is terrible.”

Baroness Hale, who was appointed a High Court judge in 1994, said that she approved of a tie-breaker system which would see people appoint a candidate from a minority background if all applicants were seen as equally qualified. She described such a system as “affirmative action” as opposed to “positive discrimination”.

Despite the Law Society statistics showing that 47 per cent of solicitors and 35 per cent of barristers are female – there are only 21 women judges in the Court of Appeal and High Court - out of a total of 148. These figures are also in spite of women accounting for over one-half of new entrants to the profession since 1993.

According to research from recruiterLaurence Simonsat the start of this year, the average pay for male lawyers - both in-house and in private practice - was down £5,000 on 2011, while pay among female lawyers was up by nearly £1,400.

However, despite this rise, the average female lawyer is still paid £51,396 less per year than the average male. Female lawyers' average total remuneration is 68pc that of men.